For those who have the same warped sense of humour this Letter can also be had in French.
(Complaints can be addressed to the Blog Council, your nearest newspaper, radio or TV station and when you leave this blog remember to pull the chain)
*Terms & Conditions Apply, if you can find them.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

IT'S A PAYNE WHEN MUM EDITOR LETS HER RACIAL BIAS SHOW

Dear Samantha Enslin-Payne, Deputy Editor of the Business Times,

The
titled of your column today (May 14) headed: Inequality: how can we face our children? should have read: How can I face my readers after this?

You
wrote how difficult it was to explain to your children that the lives of Blacks
in South Africa
had hardly changed since the Black majority government came to power in 1994.

To
back your line of thinking you quoted from the 2016-2017 annual report of the
Commission for Employment Equity. As a journalist in your position I would have thought you would have analysed it in a reasonably unbiased way and not cherry-pick
it to suite your own argument.

As
this Commission is a Government organisation, one would hardly expect it to be
anything other than very pro-Black. And that is certainly reflected in this
report to a quite unnecessary extent.

You
quoted Tabea Kabinde, chairperson of the Commission as saying: “Whites, despite
constituting only 9.5% of the economically active population, still took the
lion’s share of top management positions in the private sector.”

Your
story continues with: “Africans, who constitute 78% of the economically active
population, account for 10.7% of management positions in the private sector
compared to 72 % among whites.”

Nowhere in your entire column did you
mention anything about the colour of those employed in the public sector where
a Black Economic Empowerment policy (old time apartheid in reverse) is the
norm.

I
can understand why you didn’t want to mention that because it pretty well blows
your cause completely.

Tabea Kabinde

Perhaps you didn’t see or didn’t want to
see that the Commission concluded that Africans hold 74.6% of the top jobs in
Provincial Government and 76.0% of those in Local Government. “There is a 33.3%
split between African and White males in National Government” we were told. Women evidently don’t count and if you look at a
picture of the members in Parliament you don’t get the impression that there
are an equal number of Blacks and Whites.

Can
colonialism and apartheid be blamed forever for the slow progress of Blacks in
our economy? Surely after 22 years of running the country the Blacks must take a
lot of the blame for keeping the majority back with things like an appalling
education system.

Also
it evidently doesn’t bother you that we are still perpetuating apartheid style
government by colour coding the entire population so that our rulers know who
to give preferential treatment to. As you no doubt saw that report gives
figures for Whites, Africans, Indians, Coloureds and Foreign Nationals, with
only Blacks being classified as Africans when most, if not all the Whites,
Indians and Coloureds were probably born in South Africa making them as African
as anybody else.

Many
of our problems with nation building will never come right until the Government
leads the way by referring merely to “people” without classifying them the way
it is doing.

Even
though huge operations like the South African Broadcasting Corporation, South
African Airways and the Post Office get bailout after bailout from the
Government, they are still in deep financial mire.

The
private sector has no such limitless backing, yet I defy you to name one large
comparable company headed by a White that is in anything like the same kind of
trouble.

Talking
of the Post Office I am sure you know what colour the man is who has been
brought in to save it. Significantly he was put there by our Black Government
that wasn’t prepared to uplift one of its own by giving him or her the job.

There’s
hardly anything run by the Government that is not suffering from terrible
inefficiency and mind boggling graft. The railways are in a mess with Cape Town’s Metro rail inconveniencing
thousands daily by having more delays than running time. Main
line passenger trains are no better. They are guaranteed to stop
for hours in the middle of nowhere so that passengers never have any idea when
they will actually arrive at their destination. Numerous local councils are
bankrupt with the Police Service and Eskom’s hierarchy in disarray. Not to
mention a President hiding under a huge cloud hoping nobody will notice what
he’s been up to, while prominent members of his own party call for him to step
down. And that’s just a rough sample.

Oh
and whose fault is it that our country has been downgraded to junk status?

These are the areas that the Commission
tells us are mostly headed by Blacks so surely we must thank God for that 9.5%
of Whites who are keeping the most productive part of the economy on the road.
Without them we would all be even further down the drain than we already are and
nobody would have a job of any kind.

It
would be just as futile then, as you have done, to blame colonialism or
apartheid when we know perfectly well what the real cause is.

If
your column is an indication of what you are telling your children I think you
are misleading them. You neglected to put things fairly in perspective by giving
both sides of the story like every cub reporter learns to do at journalism
school.

Unfortunately the way things are heading
that small percentage of Whites, who are our life line at the moment, might
soon disappear altogether. Then we’ll have to see if we are any better off with
top management in the private sector being 100% Black. But it will be one hell
of a gamble judging by what has already happened in the public sector.

The
papers are full of stories about the rich planning their escape to other
countries if radical economic transformation means having their properties
seized and riots get completely out of hand. The ‘rich’ they are talking about
are almost certainly 100% White.

I
hope I haven’t whitewashed the seriousness of the situation.

Regards,

Jon, the Poorman’s Press
Ombudsman.

P.S. You are in good company when it comes to
understanding the Black and White complexities of our employment situation.
Advertising in your own paper for a Municipal Manager the KingCetshwayoDistrictMunicipality
had this to say:

The Municipality subscribes to an Affirmative
Action Programme, which is non-racist, non-sexist, non-discriminatory and based
on merit.

P.P.S. For readers who don’t know Business
Times is the business section of the Johannesburg
based Sunday Times. Its Editor Bongani Siqoko certainly hasn’t let the
country’s history hold him back. And presumably he’s in that 10.7% of Blacks
who have made it to top management in the private sector.

No comments:

Post a Comment

twitter

tweet

About Me

I was born in South Africa just before the Boer War whenever that was?
Started life with a golden spoon in my mouth which made eating rather difficult as a result I was under nourished as a child.
Went to a posh school where I only got moved up a class when my old man donated another sight screen for the cricket pitch.
Career prospects were dismal and I was once turned down for a job in the London sewers. "Too highly qualified;"that’s what they said.
I became a journalist when the Police Force wouldn’t have me.
Like most journos I know nothing about everything but I still write about it.
I decided to have my own blog so I wouldn't have to drink with the editor for hours on end to get my stuff published when according to my independent assessment it’s always of great news value.
My religious beliefs are: You only die once so remember, "You can’t be serious and Have Fun."
NEWS FLASH: I've just been appointed the Poor Man's Press Ombudsman by Presidential Decree (Not to be confused with the PRESS COUNCIL OF SOUTH AFRICA'S, SA Press Ombudsman)